Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day

Today’s Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day: “Send away all these wives and their children” (Ezra 10:1-5).

While Ezra prayed and made confession, weeping and throwing himself down before the house of God, a very great assembly of men, women, and children gathered to him out of Israel; the people also wept bitterly.

Shecaniah son of Jehiel, of the descendants of Elam, addressed Ezra, saying, “We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. So now let us make a covenant with our God to send away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law. Take action, for it is your duty, and we are with you; be strong, and do it.”

Then Ezra stood up and made the leading priests, the Levites, and all Israel swear that they would do as had been said. So they swore.

And when Shecaniah son of Jehiel returned home among the Elamites, he said to them: you know those hot shikses you’ve been marrying lately? Send them all home, and marry some nice Jewish girls instead. And the men of the Elamites told him to stick it, because there was no way they were giving the dowries back, and do you know how much my father-in-law earns? And Shecaniah said nothing, but the next time he saw Ezra he told him he’d ‘dealt with it’.

reynard61

When I read this verse a few years in the full context of the Old Testament, I got a sudden chill when I realized that some the Ancient Israelites were just as obsessive about racial purity as the Nazis. (At least some of the other, less dickish Israelites gave us The Book of Ruth to balance things out a bit.)

http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

I’m still not even sure I get this chapter.

“So now let us make a covenant with our God to send away all these wives and their children”

Even given the necessarily euphemistic language and the necessity of reading this in a language I can actually read, since I can’t read Hebrew, it strikes me as a little bizarre to think this dude decided they could just break up a bunch of families for the sake of ethnic purity and not spark a revolt of some kind.

I was watching “The Death of Yugoslavia” a while back, and there are some really uncomfortable similarities between this ancient notion of ethnic cleansing and the things the Bosnian Serbs, in particular, got up to.

ohiolibrarian

What did he mean “according to the law”? Did they have to return dowries or otherwise provide for these women and kids?

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